Wot I Think: Monaco

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Monaco won the IGF in 2010 with a compelling prototype and a handsome smile. In 2013 it’s being released as a sprawling, brilliantly-composed heist game that is poised, like a ludological cat-burglar, to steal our imaginations. The years of polish show in layers of features and detail, while the core idea that won the IGF – of single or multiplayer replayable heists – continues to produce gold on every playthrough.

This is one of the most important independent games this year, and might well end up being one of the best-loved games of the decade.

Let’s get this straight: Monaco is a fascinating, beautifully-made game. There’s some unevenness. There are some oddities. Some people won’t gel with its pace or its challenge.

It’s brilliant.

Monaco is a meticulous cartoon of thievery and over-the-top smash and grab. It is a top-down perspective tale of complex heists in a world where the usual suspects of crime each have their own unique talents, like the character class formula of Ocean’s 11 distilled down to tiny, racing pixels.

It has a distinct flavour to it, in the way that the best games do. I can’t define this feeling well enough to really articulate it, but there’s a sort of psychic remainder that comes from games having enough of their own inertia to really define themselves. It’s not a game that has borrowed from others, particularly. It is a not a game that leans on other games in the genre for its credibility. Monaco is the guy who is cool because he is himself, not because he does the things other people do really well.

As I was saying: Each character has a unique ability, but can also pick up various bits of equipment that are available to all. So you might choose The Lockpick, for fast opening of doors and containers, but you might also carry a shotgun for dealing with pesky aggressive cops. Each level – there are many and they become huge – is a labyrinth of possible situations for infiltration and exfiltration across multiple floors, and with dozens of tiny challenges to overcome from moment to moment. A guard dog here, a locked door there. Combine the two of those, and you end up getting bitten.

A number of cast members have their own storylines, which takes place across several levels, and progress through these unlocks other characters. You also unlock further levels and storylines as you play, and these are filled with escalating, size, difficulty, and security variables. Each one is set up with mildly amusing backstories for the thefts you’re heading into.

As you find your way through the environments, you must dodge guards and police (as well as the civilians who will alert them) and use both your powers and the environmental quirks to get through to the goal of the heist. Everyone can hack a security tripwire laser, or pick a lock, or hide in a bush, but some characters have extensions of those abilities or entirely different, unrelated abilities. The Gentleman, for example, is disguised when he’s sneaking, so even if he gets seen, he doesn’t actually get seen. If you are playing as The Cleaner then you will be knocking out guards, and using that to make progress.

My two favourite characters, right now at least, are The Hacker and The Mole (and The Gentleman for solo-play). I particularly like The Hacker because he shows off what teeming systems the levels present. While anyone can hack a computer terminal, The Hacker can use plug sockets to send “viruses” spinning around the level infrastructure. This allows you to disable alarmed doors, security cameras, and so on, but it also gives you an idea of how much there is going on in any single building. It’s a beautiful thing to see buzzing around you. It adds more life to a game that already feels fresh and awake and busy.

The Mole, meanwhile, is able to smash through walls and scenery. I like this because it gives the world a sense of malleability, while at the same time offering up some big concessions to AI behaviour – you make a lot of noise breaking through stuff with your sledgehammer, and the nearby NPCs come running to see what’s what – something that certainly shows off the moments where you find yourself chased through the level. And get chased through a level you will.

This point – that I have two favourite characters – sees me run into one of the crucial problems with game reviewing. I haven’t played this all that long, despite having visited it at preview, and dabbled with it for a week or so, and right now it feels like some characters are much stronger and more interesting than others. I could put that down to poor design, or some kind of imbalance. But I’m not sure that’s the case, and I am not sure because I think understanding the true potential of all the characters included here requires far more time, and far more multiplayer. It requires a longer view. A higher viewpoint over an extended exposure to the possibilities of mastering aspects of the game. But let’s come back to that in two paragraphs time.

Monaco’s presentation is odd and yet entirely charming. I am acutely aware that it doesn’t work in screenshots. It really doesn’t look… well, it’s barely comprehensible in static images. Videos aren’t much better. You need to play it. And even then it feels a little inconsistent, perhaps, but at the same time it is rich and super-animate. There’s something not quite right about the characters, but the way they move and the way they act sells their behaviour quite convincingly. It’s the audio that stands out, however, being both precisely informative about what’s going on in the world, as well as very funny.

The maps are presented, in part, as the plans of the buildings you are breaking in to. This, though, is clouded by fog of war, and also line of sight. What is unknown stays black, and what can’t be seen remains grey. What can be seen by a character is a brightly coloured and lively world, although not one that seems to conform to any particular world. It’s vaguely contemporary, and vaguely European, but not distinctly either of those things. I had imagined that Monaco would have some kind of period feel, or some kind of heist-thematic palette to tie it all together, but it does not. There’s something lacking there, although it is not to the detriment of the game in any serious way.

Let’s return to that point about multiplayer. Monaco can be played entirely single-player and offline. You can jump in and play on your own – if you die you have to try again from the last floor change with another character – and doing that allows you to unlock characters and levels. Most people will play like that, I am sure, and it’s well balanced – perhaps sometimes too easy – to get through on your own. But doing so would be missing the larger part of what Monaco is. Just as Borderlands can be played on your lonesome, the game is a much more rewarding experience when being played with others.

The comparison with Borderlands is an interesting and useful one, I suspect, despite the two games being so vastly different, because they both gain something from have 2-4 players. What they gain from adding in those players is quite different, and that sheds light on the nature of their individual designs.

In Borderlands, I would say, the effect on the experience (if not the number of baddies etc) is direct, linearly additive. The more people in a game of Borderlands, the more shit flies, the more damage gets dealt, the more chance you have to be saved from death, and so on. The shooter in it gets MORE. What Monaco gets from adding other players, however, is more like a multiplier, or an even more complex function. The characters are so different, and their powers so wide-ranging, that the possibilities for attacking any given level change quite radically. Hell, The Mole can literally change the layout of the map by putting a hole in the wall. The character abilities, rather than producing more damage, or more healing, as in the shooter, provide a wider range of possible variables within hacking, sneaking, breaching, and so forth.

What this means is that while each level of the game is essential a different experience with each character – The Lookout being able to see NPCs at a distance is quite unlike The Hacker fiddling his way through the electronics – each multiplayer game is an equation made of the different levels versus the abilities of the different characters playing the level. Playing a bank heist with The Cleaner And The Gentleman is almost like a different game to playing it with The Lookout and The Mole. Add another two abilities sets in there and you have a sum of gameplay experiences that look quite radically unlike the other possible sets that await you.

Of course this observation can be balanced by arguing that just legging it, supplemented by hiding, is the most powerful tool for all the characters (at least in some of the early stages), but I feel that also misses the point. What is critical in a heist is elegance, and the role played by the participants in that job. Timing. Getting that plan right, or winging it with grace and precision with things go awry. The levels become so tricky, with some many vectors for failure, that getting things absolutely right requires patience, timing, and multiple tiers of awareness.

Monaco is so often the alternate vision of all those seamless criminal plots where the sexy masterminds have their way with priceless works of art. You will sometimes pull off that perfect caper, but for the most part it’s a chaotic rumble that leads to disaster. You probably will get out alive, maybe, you probably will become a master criminal, eventually, but there are going to be a lot of dead security guards and ringing alarm bells along the way. It is one of those games where it is at its best when your actions are causing an avalanche of jeopardy. This, I suppose, is mostly likely to be Monaco’s weak spot: it’s so easy to screw up that multiplayer games seem bound to spark arguments, in that way that so often happens when pairings are not between friends. You can play with friends, of course, so I’d imagine the RPS Monaco group will spring up soon enough.

Oh, there’s lots of talk about. More than I can fit into this page without your attention drifting. If this game doesn’t generate a lot of talk then I will eat my balaclava and plug my nostril with celery.

What I am saying is: buy Monaco. Play it with people. Enjoy 2013. This year is going to be great.

Asher. even though Susan`s blog is cool… on friday I got a brand new Mazda since getting a check for $8080 thiss month and also $10,000 lass-month. with-out a doubt this is the easiest-work Ive had. I began this three months/ago and immediately got me more than $72, per/hr. I went to this site wow65.com
(Go to site and open “Home” for details)

Been in the beta for a while and I’ve got to agree it’s an excellent experience, looking forward to COOP with friends as in single-player I’ve had to resort to violence for often than I’d like.

16:49 GMT: So people are aware, Monaco is now available on Steam but it’s not installing correctly for some people, restarting Steam fixes this in most cases but for some people it requires a couple of restarts while Valve’s servers update.

Yes, plays perfect on for local co-op. I used 2 Xbox 360 controllers. I got my mostly non-gamer wife playing last night, and we ended up finally quitting after about 3 hours, and looking forward to playing again tonight. Really a lot of fun, and fairly forgiving in the beginning, so no worry about arguments or frustration… as long as you like your wife and she likes you! :)

Some games just reek of F.U.N. This sounds like one of them. It’s a pity that the single player is “too easy”. I assume from that that The Mole – when controlled by the AI – won’t decide to blow holes in walls willy nilly? That might have been a good thing. Or bad. Still, this is a must play.

Good grief, yes. While most of the levels aren’t too difficult to just bodge through, cleaning the later levels out 100% is incredibly tricky, particularly when playing solo – and you’ll want to clean them out.

As for having multiple abilities in Multiplayer, I would argue the game is more challenging. Not only does the game get out of control more quickly (all FOUR players tripping alarms, alerting guards, etc), but you cannot simply die and revive as another character, your teammates MUST revive you to continue. So it’s more of a struggle for survival at that point. Heh.

Have been following the development of this game since RPS first started covering it, it’s been one of the games releases I’ve been most looking forward to for a long time. Can’t wait to get at it later today.

Gonna be a little busy today but I just wanted to pop in here to say to RPS readers that you are the best of the internet. I love you guys and gals. You made the best beta testers and I always appreciate the general humor and maturity of this little enclave. Monaco owe a lot of thanks to you guys. Thank you!

Hi Andy, a couple of questions: I currently have only one XBOX gamepad – is it possible for me to play two player co-op with a mate, me on keyboard, him on the pad? I also have a PS3 pad, if I used one of those free pad emulation utils would Monaco recognise that as a second controller? (I assume it would, but just wondering if you could confirm?)

Hey! In case Andy is busy (and I KNOW he is), I may provide some answers :3

First off, you CAN have two players on a single computer, one on a gamepad, and one on a keyboard. As a standard setting, you can have one person on keyboard and then three others on gamepads, though FEASIBLY there is a way to put multiple players on a keyboard, as one of the beta testers figured out by changing a .ini file.

Second, you can use a Dualshock 3 for sure! One of the beta testers started out with it, using MotionInJoy software.

I think this and Dead State are the only games in years where I have regularly checked to see if releases dates have been announced. Other games don’t really get my attention until they’ve been out for six months and are on sale.

It “plays just fine singleplayer” the same way Magicka “plays just fine singleplayer”. That is; it’s technically *possible* to play it single-player, but it will be a much worse experience, have much less content, give the slight, nagging feeling that the developer genuinely dislikes you for it and considers you a second-class citizen, and generally just be a worse version of the multiplayer.

“Just as Borderlands can be played on your lonesome, the game is a much more rewarding experience when being played with others.”

This mirrors what I’ve heard: The game is fun on your own, and you still get 100% of the content in singleplayer. It’s just that Co-op is so good that it overshadows it. Really you’re punishing the dev for making co-op too fun.

Magicka was really made around the idea that you can die easily and be revived easily (both by the hands of your teammates). As such, the single player suddenly became some hardcore mode, highly punishing and not that fun. I really love Magicka, but playing it alone was a chore.

Having played both, I can assure that Monaco doesn’t feel that way at all. When played single, it feels and plays good too. Coop is just adding more chaos (or large plans) to that, but it’s perfectly enjoyable by yourself. (well, at least for as far as I played, so around 8 levels)

I’ve just finished the first campaign of the game. I can tell you certainly that this game is absolutely fun to play in single player. I really enjoy playing it multiplayer, and I think it adds a lot to the game, but the single player is still quite excellent.

while I have 3 people playing right away, looking for a fourth. if there is a laid-back RPS’er who enjoys playing for fun and does not have a group they plan to play with, message me on Steam (or send me a PM or reply to this thread)

may I also suggest an RPS group for this game – its the type of game you want to play with people who are not going to rage and who can laugh at mistakes – basically made for real-life friends, but I know not everyone knows a full group to play with or would like to play with others who are nice

That’s definitely not just a steam key is it? I’m hovering over the purchase button on that link but the only mention of DRM-free I can see is for Monte Carlo. It’s the Humble store so it’s gotta be DRM-free right?

From what I can tell its a Steam key. The DRM-free part is the prototype. However, I also found a tweet that indicates the game is “DRM-free” even on Steam, but it requires Steam for online play, leaderboards, and achievements. So…guess it depends on your definition of DRM-free. link to twitter.com

From the website, as far as I can tell, if I plunk down my cash and don’t want to deal with Steam, all I get is the 2010 prototype. Of course, I used to think Humble Store would reliably give me a standalone installer, but since they’ve gone Steam-key only for some of the bundles it’s hard to tell.

I think i’ll hang on and see how offline it actually is. I was looking forward to this to for some local multiplayer on the laptop while offshore and internet is hard to come by when your on a random boat off the coast of god knows where. Another summer of Civ IV and 4player Snes roms might just kill me, a man can only take so much Bomberman

What’s with the neon haze everywhere? Does it represent/indicate anything? I understand the line of sight/fog of war stuff just fine, but it looks like all the glowy light is making things hard to see and I don’t know why.

It’s mostly hidden ambient lighting. Just a stylistic thing, but I like to think of it as what makes Monaco Monaco! There are lots of different brightness and lighting they have to play around with so it’s different for each level!

I personally think it’s just hard to understand what’s going on in screenshots. When you get into the game and you are close to the action, everything is very easy to understand :D

I’ll probably bite – since it seems the single player is worth it. And if I can find the time (and I don’t turn out to be embarrassingly incompetent!) I might even indulge in a game or two with fellow RPSers.

So.. is this worthwhile for someone who doesn’t have friends to play with? I refuse to play MP with strangers, and nobody I know has any intentions to buy this. I like the concept, but it looks like you need more than one player to bring out the full potential of the game.

Glad to hear the game turned out so well! I preordered it in excitement when I learned about the release date.

Any word on how long before the Mac beta comes out? I used to check Hotline Miami’s Twitter feed each day, thinking it would come much earlier than it did. I don’t want to pay the same close attention to Monaco if it’s still a ways off.

Is the RPS group up and running? This is a game that most of my steam or real life friends don’t have yet so I need competent chaps to play with!

Quite the charming little title so far…I just wish the characters would look more identifiably human rather than some weird robot/aliens

Imagine the same game but with well animated little human figures with a nice hat for the gentlemen, a hood for the hacker etc
I feel the aesthetic could’ve gone in a more “realistic” direction and remained solid…but the developer had his idea and went with it…you have to respect that.